Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

So, yeah? Do they? And to what degree? Like is Tienanmen square something in China just not talk about it, or do most literally not know about it? Do North Koreans really believe the whole world is out to get them, or do they just know better than to talk about it? Do most people in Russia think a lot of their non-independent news sources are biased, and do they think the situation's better or worse than it actually is? And does censorship or propaganda happen in the Middle East, and how bad is it?

I don't do know, do you realize it?

AHEM…

Anyway, no, until some form of direct mind-control is invented, at think at least the smartest/most well educated of the population in places with mass truth distortion and suppression of government opposition are aware that shit ain't right. Specifically in reference to the Tienanmen Square event, this article seems to suggest that.

The more the older generations die off the less the younger generations know about what's up.

There are groups from border countries that try to deliver real news/etc. South Korea airdrops pamphlets and info into North Korea. It escalates into almost-war all the time, literally two weeks ago they had a high level national security meeting because South Korea started using (again) these 11 loudspeakers they have set up on the border that they blast actual world news from into North Korea.

OP can't see the forest because there are trees in the way.

Have you ever been to Russia, the middle east, China, Korea. You seem very fixated on these particular places. Do you know what it is like first hand? experienced it?

Are you sure you're not just looking through your own government manipulated window into other countries? after all you only witness the outside world through the bias of the news.

Before you even realize it you have become another speaker tower for western propaganda itself.

Captain Blubber said:

I don’t do know, do you realize it?

Yes, and of course the news in the US always presents the exact same narrative, right?

Seriously, do you have any actual evidence of this? Because the last time I checked, you can find almost every opinion expressed openly without suppression, and the very few that are suppressed have a very large and vocal group opposed to that suppression on principle. Yes, the logical principle that you cannot prove anything outside of a closed system while within the confines of that system is sound. But if that's what you're going to go off of, then why should we care about any of this at all when we could just be wasting our time in the Matrix?

To be fair, there is probably a lot our government is doing right now that we wouldn't approve of. How many people knew of the illegal overthrow of Iran's president in 1953 at the time it happened, instead of learning about it years later when the documents were declassified?

>"Seriously, do you have any actual evidence of this?"

I wasn't really going for a balls to the wall argument, just opening the conversation up with a statement. Trying to keep an open mind. So no I don't have evidence of anything particular I don't know why I would.

>"Because the last time I checked, you can find almost every opinion expressed openly without suppression"

Some opinions are expressed more than others, sometimes by more influential people in more powerful positions. The word of a homeless vagrant isn't going to match up to that of a well perceived news anchor. This also implies that propaganda exists solely through news outlets

>"why should we care about any of this at all when we could just be wasting our time in the Matrix?"

That theory was the point I was referencing. You don't realize you're being control because the system you are in disallows you to feel controlled in the first place. I'm not saying that this avenue of the subject is pointless just that it is catch-22.

The mild propaganda and cherry-picked national news here =/= state-run news agencies and mass censorship that literally keeps out the real world. I can get online and read the world's news from any perspective I want, I can read my country's news, I can read Australia's news, I can read Germany's news. The media narrative here is only being pushed to the people who rely on one of the alphabet networks for all of their news.

The difference between a free system and a propoganda and controlled one is thst while both may commit acts in secret or try and twist news in their favor, in the free system you're allowed an opinion. Even if your sentiment amounts to nothing you can still say "I like this" or "this is bullshit", or express them in some form. In a not free system you are only allowed 1 opinion, what the state says is your opinion, and if you don't you die or someone you care about dies or you all get sent to an unmarked place for the rest of your life, and no one will ever help you because the state told them not to.

Comparing the US or Western Countries of this is preposterous, on the very basis thst you have been allowed the capability of expressing such comparisons for those countries without repercussion. That is a privilege those under an oppressive system do not get to have.

All nations have propaganda of one sort or another, and at one intensity or another. Just because the US, Britain, and other Western countries are not at the extremes doesn't mean that they don't have their own version (i.e. the formation and reinforcement of media narratives and mantras).

Of course I realize that. No nation is absolutely innocent of withholding or misrepresenting information. I mean, if everyone has inherent, unconscious biases, it would be insane to assume that a group of people would be any less likely to skew the truth, be it in an effort to be as impartial as possible or an effort to push an agenda.

The reason I didn't mention the Western world in the first place was because I figured if I didn't mention it and instead let someone else bring it up, then nobody could rationally make any claim about my bias towards my alleged nationality. I had hoped I could count on people to jump to conclusions less than usual for this specific subject, since conclusion jumping is a major contributor to this phenomenon. (Perhaps it wasn't exactly nice to shoulder someone else with the burden of bringing up the subject, but I digress.)

Furthermore, taking my word that I'm being completely 100% honest about my nationality to "prove" how severely biased I allegedly am seems illogical to me. For all you know, I could be someone from Singapore or whatever that hates the United States for whatever reason and find it enjoyable to reinforce the self-centered, culturally ignorant American stereotype. And if that argument doesn't make sense because I don't do a good job of reinforcing said stereotype, then I question what grounds does that claim stand-- specifically, the claim that I believe the United Sates does not need to work on participating less in ethically dubious manipulations or concealment of information?

If you'd like some "hard data" I'd direct you to websites such as The World Freedom Press Index or The Corruptions Perceptions Index. The reason I didn't bring them up because I was interested in subjective experiences than just numbers. Additionally, I was afraid it would distract from the subject at hand and lead to debates about the validity of the claims put forth by these organizations. No, I can't confirm so far in 2015, 1 American journalist was imprisoned this year versus the 10 in Iran. No, I can't confirm that when asked in 2010 if they had taken a bribe around 26% of Russians admitted to doing so, when interviewed by people affiliated with the study. But that's the whole reason I wanted to hear a more subjective analysis-- to determine if the data I've garnered thus far confirms or conflicts with itself.

TL;DR version:
Please don't put words in my mouth. I never said America was any more or less corrupt or propaganda-heavy than any other nation.

I think the issue here is that we're confusing differences in degree for differences in kind.

I mean, of course there's a restriction of speech in popular American discourse. Some of it is overt – like the invocation of whistleblower laws (which the Obama administration has been pretty bad for), and the use of "access" to restrict press questions (so if you want to interview one of the big shots, you had better play nice), with Rolling Stone famously inciting controversy when they overstepped the "normal" bounds in 2010. Also, recently an American PhD student was forced to remove all sources drawn from Wikileaks from her dissertation as a precondition for receiving her degree. There's also more subtle forms of ideological manipulation that the American press is subject to. It shows up in weird places – like how while searching for information on American press manipulation I had to cut through a swath of articles on North Korea, Russia, and China. (If I were a Freudian, I'd call that "projection.")

So the short version: if you want a clear picture of the world, FOX and CNN can often look a lot like The People's Daily.

So there's your similarity in kind, but there's also a difference in degree.

Let's look back at that article on Tiananmen Square that 0.9999…=1 linked a little while ago. It makes it clear that even if you know the gist of what happened, it's hard to find specific details, and the internet is super censored. Meanwhile, look at all this information I was able to find about:

- The NSA's PRISM Program
- The Iran-Contra Affair
- America's 1973 coup in Chile (which deposed the elected Allende government to install the fascist Pinochet)
- Civilian casualties of the Iraq war (over half a million)
- Civilian casualties from the drone program (way too fucking many)
- The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (where African Americans were secretly injected with syphilis to see how the disease progressed)
- And just to round things off, here's a list of war crimes committed by the US Army

And just so you don't think I'm only being hard on other people's countries, here's some terrible shit Canada has done:

- The residential school system (a complicated story, but the term "cultural genocide" gets tossed around a lot)
- We once turned back a ship full of German-Jewish refugees in 1939
- Our immigration system has a long history of being racist as fuck
- And we also handed over a bunch of war prisoners to face torture abroad during the war in Afghanistan

So yeah, fuck us.

But what is my point? Well, just think for a moment all of the potential key-words I had to search in order to retrieve all of those articles. Think of all the black lists that hosting all those links could put KYM on. Heck, most of those are from Wikipedia – a site whose continued existence is a goddamn miracle considering the number of terrible things it lists the US doing. And yet Wikipedia remains up, KYM is still online and searchable on Google, and my front door has yet to be kicked down by a bunch of men in black.

There's your difference in degree: the information exists, and it's still searchable. You can go watch a Noam Chomsky lecture on YouTube and nobody will arrest you.

The problem is that people need to know to go out looking for that stuff: the mainstream press and the public education system is (like in China) stunted and narrow enough that many people are discouraged from going to look for it – often because they don't know it's out there. And so the much weaker form of social manipulation that the US practices is allowed to do its work.

There you have it: same in kind; different in degree.

Thanks for the info Platus! This is exactly the kind of info I wanted to know. Thanks for all the time you took to write out everything and include all those references.

If only more people were inclined to cite sources like you, instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. But I'll stop being such a big whiny baby and come to terms to the fact that this is the internet.

Claiming that information in the US is censored by the government is the most hilariously self-defeating claim I've ever seen.

Look at what you're writing! Don't you think that, if the government were actually engaging in mass censorship, that you wouldn't be able to say so without being censored?

Yes. But try taking it mainstream, and watch what happens.

Uh, nothing? Why do you think Alex Jones and every other conspiracy theorist is still alive?

My favorite use of "The Mainstream" being evil or wrong is when Fox News casters refer to other news stations as "The mainstream media" as if they are separate from it. Then go on to brag about how they are the most watched news station in the US.